Summary:In 1974, high-wire artist Philippe Petit recruits a team of people to help him realize his dream: to walk the immense void between the World Trade Center towers.

The latest offering from Robert Zemeckis and Sony
Pictures, The Walk, is a marvellous
tale of the twin towers, and of a man who dreams of crossing the air between
them, on a tight wire, without a support except for his balancing rod. It is an
inspiring journey of love, ballet in the sky, and the meaning of art.

Why do people create pieces of art? Why do
mountaineers take up severe, sensational challenges? Why do we watch formula-one
races? Sometimes these are the things we live for. Surely, none of us lives
just to earn his/her daily bread, have a partner for sex and to produce the
next generation? Biologically, this is what we are made for. But, even the
crassest of us would deny that this is all about life.

Slowly, more neuroscientists and philosophers of art
are coming to the consensus that art probes the limits of reality, and hence
any form of art helps the species to survive. Ask the neurosurgeon V
Ramachandran. His answer would be, art means heightened reality. Even the
surrealists suggested that.

Phillip Petit on the roof of one of the WTC buildings

Some kinds of sports are performance art. So are some
types of ballet and locational space-plays. Marina Abramovic’s performances
drew a lot of attention in the 70s and 80s. So were Uday Shankar’s dance
performances, and sometimes Ravi Shankar’s Sitar recital, in the last century.
The artist becomes the art, in all these. The Mongolian Buryat shaman’s chant,
or the African ‘Return of the dead’, which Chinua Achebe described vividly in
his novel, Things Fall Apart, are
similar spiritual performances, with
the same logic.

The Walk presents
a similar exploration. Philippe Petit, the French Wire-walker, wants to kiss
the sky. He wants to walk from the roof of one of the World Trade Center
buildings to another, balancing his feet on a tight rope. The distance is 110
ft. The height is 1776 ft from the ground. It is an illegal performance. It
must be done surreptitiously.

Murphy’s law states that if anything can go wrong, it
will, all at once. In Philippe Petit’s case, everything has chances of going
wrong. The challenge is his own, born out of his love of sky-ballet. He has no
sponsor, no financial, or even emotional, back up except for his girl friend
Annie Allix. Slowly, he gets five friends to support him – the five accomplices
to the act - out of whom one backs away on the spot.

Phillip Petit resting on the wire hanging between the WTC twin towers

The Walk, to be watched in IMAX tall format, is all
the more overwhelming because of these tantalizations. The moment you see
yourself in Philippe Petit, you start living the moments of confidence and
doubt, step by step, balancing in the air, between the twin towers.

It is covertly spiritual. Zemeckis, the Director,
craftily planted moments, in the tale, that spurt out the fact that all art
forms had their origin, and the destination, in religion. Hence, the
overarching moments, in the narrative, are when Philippe Petit finds the wire
and twin towers to be his greatest supports, and when he lies down on the wire
looking at clouds and a seagull appears from nowhere. The Walk becomes the apex
of fulfilment for him, at those moments. It becomes an act of desire, joy,
orgasm. It transforms the mundane act of walk, as if, to a dinner with the
Olympian gods. It ceases to be a challenge anymore.

Exactly, at those moments, the performance becomes the
highest form of art. Art not performed for any man. Art as a conversation with
the God.

The walk
must be caught in an IMAX theatre, if possible. One should watch the film at
least in 3D. It would be an act of sacrilege to watch this on home screen, or
laptop, in pirated version.

A Still from Robert Zemeckis' The Walk

Zemeckis, the Director of the film, has gifted us a
range of spectacles in different genres, starting from Back to the Future (1985), through Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Forrest
Gump (1994) and Cast Away (2000),
to The Walk (2015). When we teach
cinema in the class, we talk about basic types of conflicts – Man vs Man, Man
vs Society, Man vs Nature, Man vs Himself, Man vs Machine etc. Each type
presents a new group of contrasts. The Director’s job is to translate those
contrasts in the story (and screenplay) to audio-visual contrasts. It seems
Zemeckis has mastered that technique long ago.

The Walk uses
the tall IMAX technology more brilliantly than any other film made so far. The
narration demands that format. The sound keeps you alert in the spectator’s seat,
in the dark theatre. After all, it is you, the spectator, who is getting ready
to take a walk along the tight rope, at a height from where the ground looks
like the tiny puppetry show. After all, it is you who is invited to the dinner
with the God!

Highly recommended for people who love
spectacles, inspiration and confidence.

Although this is not a biopic, it is
based on the real Philippe Petit’s, the Wire-Walker’s story through the
character’s own post-event, reflective narration.

Rating: 8/10 (in the spectacle
category)

About Author -

Anirban is a Cinematographer and film teacher. After a marathon teaching of filmmaking for five years in Digital Academy, Mumbai, he is busy writing his own film now. He was with DearCinema during its first phase. Steeped in cultural theory, observation and history, he sees all his work as part of a continuum – critique. Anirban consciously plays the role of a critic while shooting films, teaching, writing stories, and of course while critiquing. His favourite filmmakers are Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyaji Ray, Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami and Nagisa Oshima, to name a few.Readers, please feel free to share your views/opinions in the comment box below. As always your feedback is highly appreciated!